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People Networking - William Buist

Networking - Discussion between Michael Beale and William Buist, October 2007.

William Buist, Director of Abelard Management Services Ltd and Chairman of the BlackStars Club within the Ecademy Business Network explains his view of networking, where and when he networks and what he considers to be some of capabilities and beliefs of effective networkers.

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http://www.ppimk.com/nlp-podcast/william.mp3 

Michael - Firstly I'd like to thank you very much for taking part in this call.

William - That's a pleasure Mike

Michael - And if I can ask you to kick off, by introducing, and giving the listeners a background of who you are and what you do.

William - My name is William Buist, and I work with business's and teams of business's to help them build trust and collaborative working practices amongst the team, and one of the reasons that I've got involved in that is because it also uses a lot of the skills used in networking to make it effective. I also worked with ecademy, the online network, to help them with their life members club, which is called Blackstar.

Michael -  Can you give me an idea of what sort of clients you have regarding your key business?

William - I've worked with a whole variety of dif business sizes, but perhaps one of the better examples is when I did work with one of the trade associations, the association of British  insurer's   on a project that involved the distribution team drawing people from a number of different companies to work on a company project relating to insurance fraud - and what I was doing was helping to help that team to gel, and work across the boundaries of being in different places, having different drivers and different goals within their own organisations, while having a common goal on an external project.

So I helped to make all of that gel, that's one example. I'm also working on a with a rapidly growing SME, and as they're taking on more staff of course, they're having to  engage those staff into those routines, and get them effective quickly. So I'm helping them do that.

Michael - And also some of out listeners won't have heard of Ecademy - so  could you give a very brief introduction of both Ecademy and Blackstar?

William - Ecademy is a online network that you'd find at www.ecademy.com, and ecademy is primarily aimed at small to medium sized business's, allowing the business owners and senior people in those companies to interact online as well as offline.

They run a lot of meetings and seminars where the members of ecademy can get together and see each other face to face, between those meetings, there's a variety of forums, marketplaces  - places where people can share their knowledge and experience online. And so get to know each other before they meet. And continue the relationship building after they've met as well.

Within that there's a community called Black star which is the life members club. And that's a relatively small part of the organisation but a very active one, involving of about 400 people, who've committed to a ecademy membership for life and who meet regularly share their expertise, share their knowledge and help each other.  

Michael - Where and when do you network?

William - Pretty much when the sun's up!

William - And sometimes when it's down too. But I think networking is one of those things that it's very easy to think 'Am I networking now, or aren't I?' but in fact what it's really about is building relationships with people you meet.

I tend to be travelling a fair amount with the various bits of work I do, and I meet a lot of people in these travels and often the conversations are purely social, and yet really that's networking. I'm building  relationships with these people, I'm understanding them a bit. And maybe these conversations will lead to more detailed conversations -  but maybe they don't. However  whichever of those two result I feel that its a part of the whole networking process.

Michael - I'll build on that a little bit - what is it that networking means to you?

William - Primarily it's means the opportunity to meet new people, to get to know them, to understand what's important to them, what sort of help they need in their business or indeed in their personal life. It means using the knowledge that I have, both in terms of how networks work, but also in terms of the people I've already met, knowing what they do and being able to bring people together who can help each other, either for personal development or business development and one of the things I've tried to do in all of my networking days is to make those connection, to get the right people together and when I do that people do it for me as well. So it's a two way street.

Michael - So when you're networking, what actually do you do? You meeting somebody for the first time, what do you say to them? Take it as if you were teaching me how to network.

William - Perhaps it's worth taking a step back and talking just for a quick moment about some common misconceptions about networking.

Michael - Excellent.

William - and I think when I was in corporate life, and I've think a lot of people who are in big companies performing a specific role, they tend to be quite focused on that role. And when they meet new people in seminars and all those things that you tend to go on in the big organisations, the focus tends to be around the question that a lot of people ask, and that's 'what do you do? And people then focus on their role, talking about what you do.

While it's important on one level, most of the time most people won't be desperately interested in what you do. Because it's just something that you do, it's part of our general lives.

What they are interested in though, is how what you do can interact with the rest of the world, and in particular with them, if that makes sense.

So the first thing I would say to anybody who comes to me and says 'can you help me to network?' is to take the focus away from themselves and what their specialty is and what their role is in whatever job they have - and to put the focus on the other person,  not on 'what they do' but, 'what stops them doing what they do?'  'What's difficult for them?' 'What's hard?'. and the reason to do that is to find a means - fairly quickly - of being able to help them, to give them a pointer, to give them advice, maybe give them a bit of the experience that you've had in these things.

So an early question might be something like "What are you working on right now?" or "What project are you working on?" people will naturally tell you about the things that are important to them in their job in that sense, in the project sense.

And the follow up question is 'what makes that hard?' and it's really to get to that follow up question, that's the one that gets you talking about some things that are perhaps a bit more attached to emotions as well - because when you start talking about things that are hard, it's hard to do that without sensing the emotions that you're feelings, the frustration.

So that's one route -another way to look at that is to perhaps move away from the standard questions, that lead to a very short and perhaps not very well thought out answer like 'What do you do?'  that tends to lead to an answer like 'oh,. I'm an accountant' and it's fairly hard to know where to go from there, it's a fairly closed answer. But if you're asked the question 'what's your expertise' you might still get the 'I'm an accountant answer' because people find it hard to think immediately on what their expertise is, but you might also get the answer that says 'my expertise is actually is in understanding the details of corporation tax law, and helping business's to maximise their profits by minimising the tax liabilities that might occur." Quite a different answer, yet still the same profession underneath it.

Michael - I like that.

William - That leads you to be able to discuss elements of that, where you may have some knowledge of somebody who is struggling with corporate tax bill right now for example, a perfect client, a good introduction, you might know somebody know is also in that field maybe with connections to a lot of tax accountants, and an introduction with them might be useful for collaboration. And that's what I'm trying to do all of the time, to find all of those little connections that help people move their business or move their personal lives along. Does that make sense?

Michael -  That makes perfect sense, I like that. What sort of skills do you think you have that enable you to do this?

William -   I think three things really, Mike. The first is that I've really had to teach myself this point and make myself conscious of it all the time, as that is the point that I made earlier about shifting the focus away from yourself and onto the other person - and the skills that go with that.

The second one, is an ability to listen, not just to the words that are being spoken to you, but whets driving them - what are the emotion that's beneath that.  And sensing when there's an area of difficulty or frustration or annoyance, that you can explore in order to help the individual you're talking to around that area. So it's a sort of 'listening to emotions' skill. If that makes sense.

And I think the third thing is an absolute understanding that when you help others, they will help others in their turn, and when people do that in a group, you will get the help you need -

You may not get that right now, you may not get it from the person you're talking to, but you will get it because you're feeding into an environment that is helping people rather than an environment that is just looking for help.

And I liken that one to if you go to a party with a gift, or somebody at the party, you don't mind who the gift is for, you just want to give it to somebody - and you've decided that you want to give your gift before you accept one from somebody else. But if else at the party decided to take that line, nobody is there able to accept an gift, so you can never give your gift because there is nobody to give it to. So, being able to give is important, but being open to receiving when somebody is ready to give to you is just as important.

Michael - How did you learn to network. I think you said you were self taught. So how did you learn to do it?

William - I think that really started when I left corporate life,  I very quickly realised that I didn't understand networking, so what I did was I started first of all with one of the face to face networking organisations that meets over lunch or breakfast, and joined them and begun to recognise this whole thing about being both open to give and receive and looking for opportunities  to help other without necessarily looking for any return for myself.

That was  kind of rubican moment. Then I joined ecademy because I saw the opportunity to help build relationships online, and to keep good lines of communication open using that tool, and in amongst that I met some people who were clearly very skilled net workers and had been involved in that kind of thing for a long time, and I looked at what they were doing and I looked at what was working for them - I chatted to them a lot, and I actually started to use networking to learn how to network.

So when people said to me things like "How can I help you" a common question when you meet people within a networking environment, one of the question I would ask is "What is the best thing you know about networking? What is it that makes it work for you?"  and I very quickly gather lots of knowledge about different styles, different tools, different ways of working, and I just kept working and just kept learning that way and I'm still doing that. 

Michael - What do you believe about yourself while you network?

William - What do I believe about myself? What a great question! And that's one of the keys I think , being able to ask great question that makes people pause and stop and think as you've just done - giving them cause to really examine what they're doing - that's a key thing. So..

William - I think what I believe in networking is two things -  I believe that I'm a good listener, and as I said not just to the words but to the emotions that underlie them, and recognise what they are, so I do believe I'm good at that, but I also believe that I'm still learning. That I've got an enormous amount still to learn about making networking really effectively for everyone involved in it.

Michael - And what do you believe about the people you network with - you're going into a room for the first time, you don't yet know the people there - what beliefs do you have about the people you're about to meet?

William - Three things. I don't know who they know, but I know that they all know lots of people - so if I can connect with them in a way that enables them understand what I need, then I get access not to a room full of people, but a room full of people's contacts, and that may be several thousands of people - so every time you go into a networking meeting, it's really not the people in the room that you want your message to get to, just as it's not the people in the room that they want their message to get to - they're talking to me to because I know people who I can introduce them to and help them, who aren't there.

And so a key thing, is to be able to explain and express what you do in a way that enables people to make those connections to people who aren't there.

In fact, I've described network value to people in the past, and the value of your own network - it's quite difficult to put a measure on what the value of your network is, but I kind of liken it to thinking of the real value, comes so when people who, you don't know, are talking about you, to people whom you don't know, and you'll never know those conversations are happening until one day you pick up the phone and somebody says "I've been told I need to talk to you." and I love those calls, because you know that your network is really working for you.

I've talked a lot about how networking is about the action of finding a way of helping others, ultimately to cut to the chase, the reason we network is to get knowledge and contacts for ourselves, and the trick is for me is that understanding that the way you can do that most effectively, and the most effective way I know, is to give knowledge and give contacts to the people that I meet, so it goes around and comes back to me, but ultimately that's what I'm after, knowledge and contacts.

So it's keeping the ears open for those snippets of knowledge that help build me and those contacts that I need to talk to.

Michael - Any other believes about the people you're about to network with?

William - Yes, indeed. I certainly believe that they will have people out of the room who will be great people that I need to get in contact with. I think the second thing is that they're all there for the same reason that I'm there, to network with each other, and probably, with a good normal distribution as with most things in life, you'd expect some of them to be really good networking and a lot of them probably not to be that skilled, and not to have that skill in their core, as it were. So one of the things that I try to do is to think a little bit like 'if this were my party, what would I be doing now as a host right now to help those people who are feeling a bit nervous and a bit uncertain, and how can I engage more with to make them feel more at home?' because if everybody feels at home, then the whole event will be more successful.

Michael - Do you have a personal mission when you network, who is William when he is networking?

William - One of the first rules of networking, is that the only person that William can ever be is William.

Michael - Right

William - If you put a facade or some strange cover on yourself, trying to be something that you're not, it will very quickly be found out.

Because networking is a very word of mouth process, networking works when people are talking to each other, but if you're found to be hiding something, and not being as open as you need to be, word of that gets around pretty quickly, so it's not an effective strategy. 

One of the phrases you hear a lot in networking events is 'how's business?' and the answer that you almost universally hear is 'It's great thanks' or some variation of that. I always follow up that question with 'No really, how's business?' and quite often to that second question you get a very different answer of 'well, it's a bit tough at the moment.' and that's an example of the kind of thing I mean.

If you're finding it tough to get new business or to get sales, or if you've launched a new product and it's not working in the way that you'd expect, say so.

Because somebody somewhere will have the information and the knowledge that you need to get it moving in the right direction instead of it sitting there. But if you say business is great will people refer business to you? Because you're busy enough, aren't you? So being totally clear an open, in a positive way is always the best thing to do in my experience.

Michael - Before I ask you to give your contact details, do you think that there is anything that we haven't covered that as so far as explaining what it is that makes networking work.

William - Just one thing that I think we haven't covered, and that's really around the fact that networking is a process, it's something you can learn, it's  a way of engaging with people, it's a way of finding knowledge and contacts - that makes it sound quite clinical doesn't it? And actually it's really about people and about spending time with people and getting to know them - and that's about having fun.

So if you're not having fun when you're networking change the way you do it, because it really really should be fun too. So I think that's critically important.

Michael - Ok, would you like to give your contact details.

William - One easy way to get me, and this is primarily a results of doing a lot of stuff on Ecademy, is just to look me up by name - it's William Buist, if you www.google.co.uk  that it find me at the top of the list, so you can find my details that way.

Other than that, you can call me at 01291 622598 that number will find me or a messaging system wherever I am. So feel free to give me a call any time.

Michael- Thank you very much.